14 May 2007

It’s been a full month (wow) since I last posted, that isn’t saying I haven’t been up to stuff, it was more I was waiting until I had good news and then was swamped with other things and didn’t have a time to sit down and put something down as a post.

So yeah, that good news, I am now declaring April over and am quite happy about it. As you can see directly below this post, it didn’t start off all that great and the tree planting I was planning did happen, but on the schedule I planned, it was delayed two weeks and I did find out that rib I only thought was bruised was in fact cracked. Hooray! It was to the point I was almost wondering what good could come out of the month and was just waiting for May to come with the expectation things could start to work again. Obviously things can’t be that cut and dry and just the changing of the month can’t realistically change my fortunes, but it seems to do the trick for me as the tree planting didn’t get any easier, but did happen.

But first a few of what can now be considered at least a little funny now in retrospect. In addition to my tree planting being postponed due the fact the nursery I wanted to buy from wasn’t able to fill my order and told me it was impossible for the rest of the year, I got stuck in Kyiv for an extra day and had my iPod stolen at an opera (probably by my own stupidity). I had gone to Kyiv to help out a new group of trainees by basically giving them some perspective and reassuring them things will be fine. Even in a bad month good things happen and you can make it through, I’m here to testify to it. Story goes I come in with them to Kyiv and went to buy a ticket home only to discover there were only tickets in the luxury class to Lviv that day. All other tickets had been sold out. Lviv as you may know isn’t a small place in Ukraine, being as far as I know the largest city in the west and at least four trains go there daily I know of, but no seats. At that point I knew it was over. I came home on the first of May.

May had so far been a much better month since I can now declare success on the tree planting after putting over 300 trees in the ground (the iPod didn’t show up even though we went to the opera to ask later). Pictures of the day of can be seen at my Flickr site, which there is a link to from this site. I had a great group of volunteers come out to help me, so thanks a lot and also thanks to those in town that gave invaluable assistance. I didn’t know for sure if it would happen until the day before when I went with a truck to pick up the trees. Not a great feeling for me since I like to know a bit more in advance, but it all worked out ok. That has been by far the largest project I have undertaken in Ukraine thus far, and am glad I can write it off as not being a complete failure.

Another larger project I am working on is helping organize a summer camp focusing on ethnic and religious diversity in Ukraine. It is an exciting project for me as it has been a topic of interest to me for a while now. The primary organizer is an American who just recently finished her Fulbright Scholarship in Ukraine. To learn more about the camp go to www.happycampukraine.org. I made the website, that took up a lot of my time recently as well, but it is starting to look pretty good.

That also means summer is coming soon, which will change my schedule and with luck usher in some more traveling to places I haven’t seen yet. Well I hope this catches you up a little bit on the goings on here. Wish I could write more, but getting tired and need to catch some sleep. Thanks for visiting!